Rather than compare the US to the EU a better comparison would be the EU and all the Americas together. You believe that Europeans are a single group that will agree to be bound by their majority but this is not the case. Any politicised EU Commission chosen through pan-European elections would be rapidly find out that they had no real democratic mandate in many countries. Indeed even the EU Commission knows this. It is no more plausible than Americans agreeing to live under a pan-Americas government where the votes of Mexicans, Brazilians, Venezuelans, etc. would overwhelm that of the American majority.

There is no way you can say that the EU has more legitimacy than the UN, WTO etc. Your mistake is to confuse elections for those who wield a power, with referendums to legitimate that power. You believe that if the EU is given powers without asking the voters if they agree to it having them, and then later the voters are allowed to choose between candidates to wield the illegitimate powers then this legitimates both the power and its holder. It is not. That is why increasing the powers of the EU Parliament has not solved the EU crisis of democratic legitimacy.

The EU legitimacy crisis did not begin in 2005 and end in 2008. There has been a long series of EU referendum defeats, going back to the Danish referendum on Maastricht in 1993, and including the Irish rejection of Nice in 2001, the Swedish rejection of the Euro in 2003, Norwegians voting not to join the EU in 2004 etc, etc. And these defeats are only the tip of the iceberg because many nations were never allowed to vote on these treaties precisely because it was known what the result would have been. The whole EU project has become ever more de-legitimised and it did not start in 2005 but can be traced right back to Monnet and his \integration by stealth\ method. All that has changed is that people increasingly notice that their votes can influence less and less as Brussels power grows.

As for the ‘yellow card’ system, it is very far from “unthinkable” that the EU Commission will plough ahead with a legislative proposal in the face of an appeal. The rule has been designed to be used as it is written and is not the ‘red card’ you pretend it to be. Federalists do not want national parliaments to be able to block legislative proposals from the Commission. Yet this is precisely what you pretend this toothless yellow card allows when you proclaim it as a ‘welcome change’.

you’re obviously a smart fellow too, and I enjoy the exchange. Let me try and address each point as best I can, and please excuse the length of these comments.

1. I believe the multilaterals (WTO, UN, World Bank, IMF) have all experienced some form of challenge to their legitimacy, whether from social movements, or indeed the non-cooperation of their own member governments. As a result, they do not command anything near the degree of popular legitimacy presently secured by the EU. If we were to subject the Bretton Woods agreement to a referendum in each member state, there would be no possibiity of consensus. Likewise, consider that each trade round of the WTO were subject to referendum approval. We’d have seen our last. And even with the UN, which carries relatively higher legitimacy, the only country to vote on membership (Switzerland), actually rejected entry until they were made to vote again. So the legitimacy of the EU is incomparably higher than these other international organisations: a majority of Europeans say their country has benefited from membership, and even during the debacle of the Constitutional Treaty, we forget that referenda passed comfortably in Spain and Luxembourg. The EU suffered a ‘legitimacy crisis’ in 2005-8 because the bar was set too high. Even in the United States, the condition for the constitution to come into effect was not unanimous approval, but the approval of only 9 of the 13 states, by state legislatures, not by referendum.

2.
a) In determining political outcomes there are formal and informal institutions. Formally, the Queen of England has the power to dissolve parliament and appoint her horse as prime minister, but informal norms – the unwritten constitution that is the basis of British democracy – determine that she should not. Formally, the Commission may still retain the right to plough ahead with a legislative proposal in the face of concerted opposition from national parliaments, but informally, it would be unthinkable. The real question is whether parliaments can actually coordinate in the 8 weeks granted to them in which to object.

b) My same comment applies. It is possible that the Commission will respond in the way you describe. It is also possible that this could seed the basis for a more direct citizen initiation along the Swiss model. Like you, I suspect more the former, but one can’t predict how these things will evolve over time.

c) The schoolboy error is Hannan implying that i) all senior adminstration appointments in a democracy must be from among political representatives and ii) that this distinguishes the EU and the US.

On elections to the EP, what I favour is having the party groups preannounce their candidate for the Commission President, as is the norm in any parliamentary democracy. Far from causing a fracturing of the EU, I believe this would increase legitimacy by giving voters a sense that EP elections actually mattered – as their vote will determine which party group wins or loses, and that will in turn determine the shape of the Commission.

3. Yes, it is true that Article 1 of the US Constitution states this. Yet it gives the US great difficulties in participating in the emerging institutions of global governance. The US has consistently refused to be bound by the ICC, various UN treaties, and even NAFTA rulings are ‘non-binding’ as the US refused to approve any legal arrangement superseding US law (so the US retain the right to ignore judgements of rule violation). Indeed, the US Congress has periodically had to sign over its powers to the presidency (e.g. granting fast-track authority to negotiate trade deals that Congress cannot subsequently amend). Perhaps national parliamentary sovereignty had its time in 1688 or 1787, but not in the emerging twenty-first century order when our problems are primarily international.

Second, what you highlight is a problem, but not an inconsistency. As a practical matter, it is necessary to have two-stage delegation to deal with matters of international governance, whether in the EU or in other multilaterals (UN, World Bank, IMF, WTO, etc), whereby elected heads of state and government elect in turn an executive board to conduct the day-to-day business of the respective organisation. But the problem is that this creates a legitimacy gap, not least of all, because politicians blame these institutions for implementing the policies they themselves agreed to behind closed doors. The way to close the gap is to make them more directly responsive to citizens, for example through electoral processes, so that citizens feel they have a direct stake in the decisions. We can’t get there in just one day, so it will require a more incremental process of reform.

Allow me to correct you. Ashton may be a member of the House of Lords. But she is not an ‘aristocrat’. She comes from a modest background in a small town just outside Liverpool. Her efforts throughout her career led to her being made a ‘life peer’ – ie an appointed member of the House of Lords, as most of the members of that house now are.

Privately, she is thought to dislike her title, and finds it particularly inappropriate in her new job, but can’t do much about it.

Thanks Robert for a well argued, alternative and very interesting article. Along with everyone else I too was surprised by Catherine Ashton’s selection, and also to a degree with the selection of Herman van Rompuy. On reflection, however, I think these appointments are quite clever. The idea that captured the “imagination” (for want of a better word) of the media commentariat of leaders for Europe who would “stop the traffic” was in retrospect very naive and potentially damaging to the successful, collegiate way that the EU leadership operates. It was a narrative that spoke more to the media obsession with high drama and personalities rather than with the difficult, and often mundane task of maintaining political cohesion across 27 seperate national governments. The repeated use of the shorthand “President of Europe” was an example of the superficial understanding that much English-language media comment expresses on the EU.

On one other point. You wrote:

“If one is comparing how the EU is established to a federal system such as the US, then one expects popular legitimation through a referendum. But if one thinks instead of the EU as an international organisation, then there is nothing unusual about simple parliamentary treaty ratification.”

It is worth remembering that neither the US Constitution nor any of its many amendments were ever put to a referendum of the American people. American federalism is not a model for European integration that I would be comfortable with and like European politics there is often a wide gap between democratic rhetoric and practice in the USA.

In addition, I’m sure I’m not the only one that is amused by the complaints by British europhobes about the democratic deficit of the EU when their own parliament includes a chamber with absolutely no democratic manadate whatsoever. A chamber, in fact, made up of appointed prime-ministerial placemen-and-women and a rump of aristocratic members there by right if primogeniture. It’s time perhaps that British europhobes set about addressing their own democratic deficit.

Desmond O’Toole
PES activists Dublin
(personal capacity)

1. The EU is the only international organisation to suffer a breakdown in democratic legitimacy, with the WTO, UN and all the other international organisations you list not experiencing this phenomena. Yet you say the opportunities for ‘democratic participation’ are greatest within the EU. How do you explain this apparent paradox between what you predict and what is observed? (Could it be that majority elections do not provide democratic legitimisation at levels higher above the nation-state, with international organisations needing to use decision-making by unanimity if they are to preserve the democratic legitimacy of decisions reached at international level?)
2. You highlight some ‘welcome changes’ introduced by the Lisbon treaty. For example:
(a) A ‘power’ of national parliaments to challenge EU legislation (actually to challenge legislative proposals from the EU Commission on the grounds of subsidiarity only). Yet the judge as to whether the Commission’s proposals will proceed or not following such challenges is the EU Commission itself. Do you think a party in a case should be its judge? If it is a foregone conclusion that the EU Commission will never find against itself can this be described as a ‘welcome change’?
(b) The same consideration applies to another of your ‘welcome changes’, i.e. petitions to the EU Commission. Can it not be predicted that the EU Commission will use petitions for measures it was anyway in favour of as PR to proceed with them, while ignoring anything else? Is that any more ‘welcome’ than a return to subjects petitioning their kings?
(c) You ‘welcome’ the use of elections to the EU Parliament to introduce ‘competitive politics’ into the selection of the EU Commission president and to influence its legislative proposals. But at the top of the page you argue against the ‘schoolboy error’ of using multi-national elections to select the president of the EU Council and High Representative for Foreign Affairs. You can have it one way or the other but not both. Either such multi-national elections can provide a democratic legitimacy to both the presidents of the European Commission and Council or to neither. Are you wrong at the top of the page or at the bottom? (Your ‘welcome change’ to politicise the EU Commission would rapidly lead to fracturing of the non-existent European ‘demos’ along national lines with nations refusing to accept that the votes of people in other countries gave such ‘presidents’ any democratic mandate to force them do that which their majority opposes.)
3. You imply that Locke’s ‘non-delegation doctrine’ (which is the basis for sentence 1 of article 1 of the US Constitution) is not necessary because “21st century global governance” would be “impeded” should voters have to freely delegate the power for international organisations to decide the rules they live under on an arbitrary list of policies such as ‘economic coordination”, immigration, etc. Then you go on to tell Anders that long chains of delegation (involving representatives electing representatives electing representatives) “create a serious legitimacy problem for the EU”. On the one hand you suggest the nature of the problems addressed by international organisations is such that delegation is unnecessary; And on the other hand that the more direct the delegation the better. How do you explain that inconsistency?

Freeborn John – with Locke and Mill, you have smarter men than myself on your side. But regarding Locke and parliamentary sovereignty, my concern is the following: where would it leave the task of 21st century global governance? Not only the EU, but also organisations such as the WTO, the United Nations, the ICC, the World Bank and the IMF operate on the basis of delegated responsibilities, and with far fewer (if indeed any) avenues for democratic participation than those available in Brussels. So while it may be right in theory, I fear that if we took Locke’s principle seriously, in practice we’d be seriously impeding our ability to jointly manage issues such as economic coordination, climate change, or immigration.

Anders – you are right that in Europe there is are two stages of separation between citizens and their officials, such as the Commission or the new post of Council President. This weakens an important principle of democratic governance, which is the ability of the public to periodically and decisively replace one’s rulers. In my post I only deal with that of High Representative, though, as unlike the role of premier, foreign affairs is not a role typically subject to that direct mandate. But in doing so I don’t mean to sideline the important issue of this two-stage separation.

To continue on this point, the ‘two stages of separation’ indeed, creates a serious a legitimacy problem for the EU. But how does one redress it? I know some here favour abolishing such positions altogether, but that is not really an option: the next day we’d be left scratching our heads, wondering how to deal with the challenge of coordinating European climate policies, economic regulation, internal trade, and movement of peoples, and very quickly, we’d be forced to invent another international organisation remarkably similar to the EU. It is in the nature of the interdependency of nations in the twenty-first century, and the reason why other regions (Mercosur, ASEAN, the GCC) are copying the European model of regional governance.

The only credible option is to keep reforming Europe, step by step. The Lisbon Treaty actually contains a number of provisions that move us in this direction, such as the power of national parliaments to challenge legislation, and the obligation of the Commission to respond to citizen petitions. Another welcome changes would include having the party groups pre-announce their candidate for Commission President, thereby introducing more openly competitive politics to the Commission.

Finally, a number of people here point out the dubious path to Lisbon ratification, and the legitimacy erosion that has created. But is not the problem that we compare the EU to a nation-state? If one is comparing how the EU is established to a federal system such as the US, then one expects popular legitimation through a referendum. But if one thinks instead of the EU as an international organisation, then there is nothing unusual about simple parliamentary treaty ratification. And the EU compares remarkably well with other such organisations in terms of its transparency, accountability, and the possibilities for democratic participation. So it really depends on your framework of reference. The EU is neither a state, nor an international organisation, but something inbetween. It is best to judge it as such.

Is it the case that you hate educated people so much for the reason of having failed to graduate from university yourself?

Also, under one of the other posts you claim that blame for the Vietnam and Iraq wars should be put on Europe, while now you state that it is actually educated Americans who are responsible. Make up your mind I say.

I think the problem with this statement is that it glosses over the fact that most european heads of state are not elected by the people but by their respective parliaments. There is nothing undemocratic about that, it is just (for better and worse) a slightly more indirect system than the ones in the US and in France. But it becomes problematic when a further level of indirection is added, by the “election” of the EU president and foreign minister.

These are not elected by representatives of the people, subject to our direct oversight, but by the representatives of the representatives. This happens two steps away from voters, and in such a manner that no information is transferred back to the bottom level – the representatives have pulled up the ladder behind them, so to speak. That is why this whole process seems so undemocratic and illegitimate.